Big Data and Spend Analytics

What is the future of procurement? Opinions vary but there is undoubtedly one common theme – data will be driving procurement decision making given the software available in today’s market.

Modern procurement professionals need to be able to interpret, analyse and present this data much more effectively. This enables them to improve procurement processes, make more informed decisions, take greater control of areas like maverick spend and provide stronger evidence to support change.

Perhaps most critically, this capability can be used to track and verify procurement performance and improvement, which is a real game changer for many procurement functions and how they are perceived internally.

To achieve this procurement needs the technology tools and people with the skills to maximise their value. This latter point is where we come in. The skill sets required to achieve this are still relatively rare, but we have already had success helping early adopters hire the people required to take their spend analytics capability to a higher level and we know the relevant community of people well.

We are also founder members and partners of the Data Science Foundation (DSF), a professional body representing the interests of people working in the data science and advanced analytics sector.

Our work with the DSF is geared towards establishing a strong profile within the data science community enabling us to identify current and future generations of data science professionals, many of whom will develop their careers working in spend analytics in future.